cut his last deal?
From Steve Rhodes at NBC Chicago (emphasis added by me):
Madoff's Mark on Chicago -- Pritzkers among schemer's victims.If I had money to bet, I'd wager Madoff'll be coming out of his cell toes up no later than a year from today -- maybe within a couple of months.
The truly astonishing scope of Bernie Madoff's fallen financial scheme is still registering -- even here in Chicago, where victims speaking out about his sentencing on Monday are still in a state of shock.
"Life in jail is too good for him," Stuart Borg of Northbrook told CBS2. "This man has devastated not only people like myself, and richer people than me, but what I've said before – what he's done to these charities. It's unconscionable, and he has no conscience."
Stuart Borg and his wife, Rene, lost several hundred thousand dollars of their retirement money with Madoff.
"It's basically your life savings. It's your children, your grandchildren, the college funds, their inheritance - poof - it's gone."
Executive search consultant William Bakertold the Sun-Times that his losses to Madoff were in the millions.
Meanwhile, Baker thinks Madoff might gain a sense of honor by protecting his family from prosecution.
"I think he might have attained a personal victory if he can sit there and smirk about his wife and sons," Baker told the paper's David Roeder.
...
You don't screw over that many grandmas, beggar that many families and rip off that many powerful people -- get caught cold -- and then just slip quietly off to your medium-security cell at Otisville and to play sudoku in peace until it comes time for your strangely-unindicted kin to sit shiva for your filthy soul.
There are other ways this kind of thing ends. Ways that provide for the family.
Traditional ways.
Ways as old as the Romans.
From Godfather II:
Frank Pentangeli: Those were the great old days,you know... And we was like the Roman Empire... The Corleone family was like the Roman Empire...
Tom Hagen: When a plot against the Emperor failed... the plotters were always given a chance... to let their families keep their fortunes. Right?
Frank Pentangeli: Yeah, but only the rich guys, Tom. The little guys got knocked off and all their estates went to the Emperors. Unless they went home and killed themselves, then nothing happened. And the families... the families were taken care of.
Tom Hagen: That was a good break. A nice deal.
Frank Pentangeli: Yeah... They went home... and sat in a hot bath... opened up their veins... and bled to death... and sometimes they had a little party before they did it.
3 comments:
Not many people are looking at the real story behind the "victims." They are front and centre, but behind them are the money launderers. Why do you think this was all so fast and easy. Madoff knew his only choice was to confess and shut the hell up or he was a dead man a lot sooner.
Dianne Francis sniffed it out pretty well: http://www.financialpost.com/scripts/story.html?id=b6468d42-92b9-48f9-9565-e4af0d9a9624&k=93869
Here's how money laundering would have worked: Unsavory people, from drug cartels to gangsters or greedy tax evaders, are forced to keep their ill-gotten gains hidden from police or tax authorities in dirty-money havens. In order to get their money out so they can spend it, they hire such people as Mr. Madoff to "clean" their cash.
On paper, they "invest" huge sums in capital in Madoff funds in return for 10% a year in dividends. But only the 10%, plus fees for Madoff, are transferred to Madoff so he can pay the crooks in a taxable jurisdiction.
In other words, the crooks pretend to give him millions to invest, he pretends to invest it, and he collects big fees for transferring to them 10% every year of their hidden capital.
Laundering money is not for the faint of heart. These people are often dangerous, which may explain why some of Madoff's biggest feeder-intermediaries are known to police and another one disappeared from Vienna immediately after the jig was up.
This speculation is not to say that there aren't thousands of legitimate victims and many worthwhile charities.
So here's my theory:
Word of Mr. Madoff's 10% returns spread like wildfire, and everyone wanted to be an investor. A few years back, an acquaintance of mine in New York City, plus others she knows, approached him but were refused by Madoff himself.
"Trust me, you don't want to be part of this," he reportedly said.
Unfortunately, this is now an open-and-shut case. The truth will never come out, because my bet is that Mr. Madoff will take it to the grave. Or has been told, by some investors, he has to.
Thanks to Xander for his mini-essay on the Madoff scandal.
I was going to mention that I had read in a few places that no one was in Madoff's group that hadn't known that his returns were too high to be legal, and that the money they lost was pure speculation - not true investments and certainly not real charities.
Money laundering is the number one reason for all these scams. Read Russ Baker's "Family of Secrets" about the Bush connections to every evil plot (against the taxpayers who always end up paying off the damages) there has been since the Kennedy assassination (and a few before then tied to old Prescott - the Connecticut money manager for Brown Brothers Harriman - the ultimate sweet beginning).
S
I have to say beyond a doubt this is the greatest picture ever. I have yet to read the story!!
Nice Capture!!
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